Zebedee calls PCRM a ’curiously named antivivisection group‘.  Having had a look at their website, I’d go so far as to say that their moniker is deliberately deceptive.

PCRM stands for Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.  This surely means that some sort of medical qualification and practice is a requirement for membership?  And since they have four levels of membership (Basic, Patron, Leadership Circle Society and President’s Circle Society) this would naturally reflect the seniority and standing of each member?  ie a neurosurgical consultant would achieve President’s Circle Society Membership status in recognition of their achievements and respect from their peers.

Apparently such suppositions are entirely wrong.  To apply for membership, all you need to do is send in a donation - and, you’ve guessed it, the bigger the donation, the higher level of membership you attain.  For the curious amongst you, Basic Membership is a mere $20, but if you want to hang with the ‘President’s Circle’ your pockets will be a staggering $2,000 lighter!  See their website for full details - and whilst you’re there take note that nowhere does it ask for your affiliation, medical qualification, or experience of medical practice - there is no requirement for you to be a physician to join PCRM.

This beggars the question, how many PCRM members are genuine physicians?  Less than 5% according to ActivistCash.com; and even that is ‘open to question’.

And on a final note, ‘committee’ implies an (s)elected representative of a group not a paid membership.  I can hazard a guess as to how the majority of physicians in the US would feel at the thought of being represented by PCRM!  And it turns out that I’d be right - the American Medical Association which does represent the US medical profession condemns PCRM and its bogus claims about the scientific validity of animal research.

Every year the animal rights group Animal Aid mounts a publicity stunt called “Mad Science Awards”. They look increasingly desperate and decreasingly credible. The most recent, supposed to be for 2005, were actually announced last month and received no media coverage, so now Animal Aid is writing letters to local newspapers to try to drum up some interest. Not only that, but this year the group could only manage to find eight projects to criticise, in contrast with a dozen or so in previous years.

A couple of examples give a flavour. Animal Aid attempts to rubbish use of cats in migraine research: “the use of cats is particularly problematic in the study of pain, as it is difficult to monitor in this species of animal.” But a leading expert in pain research and consultant in neurology, who has introduced new and better treatments for disorders such as migraine and cluster headache, disagrees. He says that much of this came from his experimental animal work in rats and cats.

A “special award” goes to a series of university heart research projects using dogs. Animal Aid’s main criticism seems to be that these experiments were basic research.  It couldn’t find a UK cardiologist to back its claims, so it imported US “heart specialist and medical researcher” John J Pippin, who dismisses animal research thus: “This work provides an exceptional example of a common practice: the manipulation of animal models for convenience and usefulness, regardless of the effects upon the validity of results obtained.”

We see again that animal research cuts both ways.  Bonobos at the Milwaukee County Zoo are benefiting from human drugs to control their heart disease (a leading cause of death in captive bonobos).

The development of these human drugs will have involved animal research… which is now benefiting animals.

It’s nice to see that what goes around, comes around.

Read more about it here.

The latest newsletter from the National Anti Vivisection Society (NAVS) features an amazing claim in the section on ‘research without animals’. A team at Aston University has supposedly created “a human based nerve cell system which reflects the complexity of the human brain”. Wow. That’s something.

Would it be mischievous to wonder what this nerve system thinks about being cooped up in a glass bottle? If it really reflects the complexity of the human brain, it may be emotionally traumatised at being locked up all night when it could be watching Big Brother!

Seriously, of course RDS supports all types of research, including cell and tissue cultures. These can enable some problems to be studied without the use of animals. The development of alternatives is an integral part of scientific research.  But the motivation of antivivisection groups for highlighting these other methods is nothing other than to undermine the use of animals. Making exaggerated claims may help their fundraising, but does little to contribute to good science.

The researcher involved makes the more moderate, genuine and sensible point in an article on the NAVS website that:

If a novel human tissue neurotoxicity test were able to model successfully even a narrow aspect of human neural damage sufficiently well to gain worldwide regulatory acceptance, several thousand animal neurotoxicity experiments would become obsolete.

Absolutely. But NAVS are predictably dismissive of those dismal scientists who still “think cell systems cannot fully replicate the human brain”. Thank you NAVS, for this piece of expert opinion.

Taiwanese researchers have announced the world’s first 100% glow-in-the-dark pigs.

Green fluorescent protein, GFP to its friends and intimates, has been used to make transgenic animals for sometime – glowing mice have been with us since 1999.  Indeed, fluorescent beasties of the porcine persuasion aren’t a first, but what’s unique about these three little pigs is that they glow green from the inside out – even their internal organs glimmer.  Previous piggies have been patchy in their luminescence.

So, I hear you cry, what can fluorescing cloven-hoofed animals do for humans?  Well quite a lot as it so happens; they can be used to study animal models of human diseases.  Injecting stem cells from one animal into another and then examining where those cells end up, how they affect the receiver’s physiology, and if they address the receiver’s symptoms is fairly common research.  The fact that these cells glow under UV light means that the cells’ migration can be tracked without biopsies, or euthanizing the animal to obtain sections of tissue for examination with traditional methods such as histochemistry.

This is also a benefit for the pigs and other animals involved – non-invasive tracking of the cells means that the animals are poked, prodded and operated on less, leaving them to enjoy their lives in greater peace and tranquility.

Invasive techniques aren’t even required to get more disco pigs: the researchers hope that the old fashioned (but tried and tested) method of baby-making will result in the next generation… although shy pigs bemoan the lack of ‘light on/lights off’ choice.

The Government, along with most of the scientific community, believe that stem cell research offers enormous potential to deliver new treatments for currently incurable illnesses, like chronic heart disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s.

Anti-vivisection groups like to suggest that the use of stem cells is an alternative to the use of animals in research. For example, Europeans for Medical Progress states that “human stem cells have already successfully treated children with leukaemia”. But this is a treatment, not a research method.

The new report of the ’Stem Cell Initiative’ makes clear the important contribution of animal research to the emerging science of stem cell research. It highlights, for example, how the landmark discovery that new neurons are generated in the adult brain by specific groups of stem cells was initially made in mice. After this, it was rapidly confirmed in primates and humans. The report also confirms that it will be vital to test any new cell therapy preparations in animals for the absence of contaminating embryonic stem cells in order to ensure that they cannot cause teratomas in patients.

Stem cell research is yet another area of science where the use of animals is vital, as has already been described on our main website. 

The animal rights publication Animal People celebrated the end of 2005 with it’s annual analysis of key US animal rights/animal welfare groups’ funding. The biggest antivivisection group in the world by a good margin is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, with a budget of $25,063,060 in financial year 2004. This is over 50 times the budget of RDS and our US colleagues Americans for Medical Progress, to whom we are grateful for passing on this information. PeTA is also apparently the sole beneficiary a group called Foundation to Support Animal Protection/FSAP, whose budget was $3,294,816 in 2004.

So what does PeTA do with all this money, apart from killing animals (see Tigger’s blog entry last month PeTA - animal killers)? JunkScience.com has included one of PeTA’s campaigns as a top junk science claim of 2005.  PeTa’s ‘educational arm’ TeachKind, it says, reaches kindergarten children with its extremist agenda: “PeTA’s ‘learning materials’ claim that such innocuous behavior as drinking milk is an example of ‘animal cruelty,’ which their Web site repeatedly claims is an unmistakable predictor of future adult psychopathy.”

Read the full JunkScience.com entry here:

Three cheers for the animal rights group Europeans for Medical Progress (EMP) for giving us something to chuckle about as we head off for Christmas. This group, which masquerades as a scientific organisation, claims that the Advertising Standards Authority “actually upheld three complaints” against them, rather than five as we all thought. EMP claim that the ruling on complaints 3, 4 and 5 were the same, and thus treated as one complaint, and that this is “evident from the adjudication itself”.

OK. Lets take a look. The ASA ruling states that rulings “1”, “2”, “3., 4. & 5” were all upheld. We checked with the ASA and they consider those to be 5 complaints upheld. Presumably this is another example of the “careful research” and “rigorous evaluation” that EMP claim to carry out. Maybe it should be five cheers for EMP rather than three!

Debunking the claims of pseudoscience is something we like at RDS. This blog aims to do that ‘one quack at a time’. Whilst the entry animal rights and research has no new scientific analysis, it makes a compelling argument for researchers to engage in the debate.

It is nice to see Professor Steve Jones decisively debunk the animal rights myth, made for example by extremist John Curtin, that the congenital deformities caused by thalidomide were somehow linked to animal tests. In fact, it was the thalidomide disaster which led to extensive protocols for safety testing – of all types – for new medicines.

Two categorical statements can be made about thalidomide. Firstly, it was never administered to pregnant animals before it was used in humans. This is confirmed in a factsheet from the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection which states that:

The Thalidomide tragedy is often quoted to illustrate the failure of animal experiments but this drug was never tested in pregnant animals before it was released for human use.

Secondly, only five months after the teratogenic effects of thalidomide had been established and the drug withdrawn, the same effects were shown to occur in rat and rabbit, and subsequently in numerous other species of mammal. The paper in The Lancet on April 28th 1962 described the deformities in the New Zealand white rabbit with the comment that the expert had “never seen anything like this during fifty years experience of rabbit breeding”. 

The Junk Medicine column in Saturday’s Times took a thorough look at the claims in a leaflet by Europeans for Medical Progress, that was censured last week by the Advertising Standards Authority. Science journalist Mark Henderson called EMP leaflet “an outlandish example of dubious hyperbole masquerading as scientific fact”. He continues with a good explanation of why animal research cannot be blamed for drug side effects. 

Like science, maths (or math to our US friends) doesn’t appear to be a strong suit for antivivisectionists. A letter in today’s Guardian from Adolfo Sansolini of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection just doesn’t add up.

He implies that polls show decreasing support for animal research. He bases his conclusion on the following poll results:

1995 Harris poll “Is it all right to use animals in experiments to test new drugs?” 40% said yes
2001 ICM poll “Do you support or oppose the use of animals in scientific testing of new medicines for human consumption?” 46% agreed
2005 ICM poll “Do you agree or disagree with the use of animals in experiments to test new medicines?” 50% agreed

There are dangers in comparing apples with oranges, but this looks like increasing support to me.

We get some absurd emails at RDS. Here is a recent example, unedited. Perhaps he believes in a flat earth as well?

Dear All at RDS
Thank-you for confirming my suspicions; Your promotional film on CH4 next week proves you are worried that the public is becoming increasingly aware of the truth behind vivisection. (I note there is not one scientist invited to speak against vivisection just an animal rights protester, very balanced!!) Imagine if the scientific AV movement decided to do a similar TV prog.!!!!

If you’re curious to know how the shrimp’s ‘rocking dance’ has forwarded scientific knowledge, then check out RDS’ new leaflet An A to Z of laboratory animals.

It describes some of the common, and not so common, animals used in research and gives these unsung heroes credit for their participation in bio-medical discoveries.

The leaflet can also be downloaded so that you can show all your friends!

A question put to RDS today by a radio station is whether there can be a campaign to save the dog which is going to be killed on a Channel 4 programme next week. Unfortunately for those animal rights groups, sensing an emotive campaign, the programme was pre-recorded. So the answer is no.

In any case, it doesn’t make sense. Every day more than 20 dogs are killed by local authorities because they have no home. From July 1998 until the end of 2004, the leading animal rights organization PETA has been accused of killing over 12,400 dogs, cats, and other (unwanted) “companion animals” at its Norfolk, Virginia headquarters. Additionally, every day over 1,500 animals are killed for us to eat as meat in the UK.

Dogs represent less than 1 in 500 animals used in research, but the medical benefits are enormous. Only today in the prestigious journal Nature we have the announcement that scientists have deciphered canine DNA. This will give insights into many human and dog diseases and may lead to new treatments and cures for the future.